I’m waging a war against my shoes right now and I am losing big time.

A few weeks ago, I convinced myself that I needed new footwear to wear to work – as the leather of my old sandals was vomit stained and so dry and warn in parts it looked like that dry skin you usually shave off your heels.

Being the kind of person I am, I don’t work in a mega fancy workplace that requires stiff blazers or corporate wedges. But I can’t help but feel my four-year-old sandals that smell like the feet of a thousand professional runners are a little too casual for smart casual.

And when you team that with my signature “corporate comfort” look – which consists of sensible skirts purchased from op shops paired with basic t-shirts – it doesn’t scream professional. My other classic looks in my repotriore include Corooate Bogan, Stained But Chic and All For Under Seventeen Dollars. So I bought these new shoes thinking I would at least nod towards a reasonable dress standard. 

The woman in the shop insisted I buy the snug-fit flats, as apparently they stretch. This confused me as the guy at my local Akubra outlet told me that leather shrinks (which is why your hat should only be out in the sun if it’s on your head – I’m suddenly very devoted to good hatcare). And even though I’ve got two degrees and two Hungry Jacks Employee of the Month certificates under my belt, I didn’t question her. 

I don’t know what it is about the retail environment that turns generally smart, capable people into obedient schoolgirls, but every time I’m in a shop that doesn’t sell thongs I find the authority of a salesgirl to be all powerful.

I was sceptical, but then this girl insisted. She had experience in shoes and probably knew better. Even though she had not only never walked a mile in my shoes, but she had no idea how soft and sensitive the skin on my ankles is.

So instead of telling the girl “what do you know?” I complied, and even bought some leather water-proofer just to seal the deal.

Big mistake, huge.

Because now it looks like my ankles are peeling away like the outer skin of an onion. It took me less than the time it takes to walk to the train station to develop a blister on each foot with enough liquid filling them to sustain Bear Grylls for seven days in the desert. 

And I still had a whole day ahead of me. I wasn’t even at work yet.

Throughout the day I tried walking on my shows with the backs pressed down under my heel. This helped with the pain, but made me look like even more of a twat than usual.

On the walk home, it was raining. But my feet felt like someone had attacked them with a potato peeler, so I had to take off those torture slippers. I was walking as if I was a wounded solider at the end of a war movie – you know the walks where they’re limping but they’ve done The Thing to achieve The Victory and it’s all meaningful and in slow motion? It was like that, except I had won nothing and I was hobbling to a foot soak instead of a loving and unfairly hot wife, desperate to know if her hero husband was still alive and fuckable.

So I took my shoes off and walked home in the rain. To anyone else, it looked like I was one of those free sprits who appreciates life for all the tiny moments of monumental joy and beauty it contains. Maybe it looked like I had just quit my high-flying corporate job or finally asked for a divorce. Maybe I looked finally free from the weights of life that were dragging me down.

But no, I was just a fool who can’t stand up for herself in a shoe store.

The next day I got a cold and had to wear several bandaids. My feet hurt so much I couldn’t jog for a week. So I was sloppy, sick and sore all because I trusted the advice of a shoe girl.

Today I wore them again and went through seven band aids. 

I’m determined to break these shoes in. But I have to wonder if I am not the one being broken in the process. 

Out of all the things I regret in my youth, the biggest one has to be the period where I saved everything as variation of “asdflk;djfglkejtoib”. I can’t find a single bloody file on my damn laptop because of it.

This is the equivalent of realising you’ve picked up chlamydia somewhere along the line, and now you’re dealing with the consequences. Sure, it was fun at the time but now it’s like every time I look for something on my laptop, I’m burning myself with my wee. But it’s the sting of knowing my younger self could have prevented my current affliction that burns the most. Unfortunately, young people have a tendency to flit through life without fear of concern for the consequences of STIs – Stupid Taxonomy of Information.

I don’t think my being tagged in a meme that read “nothing like the days when you’d tell your parents you were at a sleepover and you’d really be dying in a field from drinking too much vodka” by people from two different groups of friends within an hour of each other is a bad sign. I don’t think my back catalogue of assorted pimp cups (many of which have now been suitable donated to the St Vincent de Paul society) indicates an unsavoury past. I don’t think my collection of Girls of the Playboy Mansion and Laguna Beach DVDs is anything to be ashamed of. No, that’s all peachy.

It is evidence of improper filing that is the true hallmark of a young and reckless mind, with far better things to do than to consider the orderly existence of her future self. It’s easy to forget the person you once were by putting it to the back of one’s mind, but the physical files on one’s computer are not so easily erased. They can be called up and within seconds the mistakes of your past are upon. Within seconds, you remember the scattered and thrill chasing person you used to be. This is all evident in the way I used to name my files. Oping the Pandora’s box of “pictures” is a fucking nightmare. Nothing is named appropriately. Nothing is named in a way so to optimise my searches. There isn’t even any logical grouping of my images into folders – I could have at least made a folder for each occasion like “That Time We Finished the Goon Box and Wore Leopard Print Pants” or “Photos of Friends They’ll Later be Embarrassed by”. Instead, they’re just all dumped there in a confusing maze of memories.

This makes it incredibly difficult to navigate one’s way around one’s computer. You can’t find what you’re’ looking for unless you’re willing to individually search through each file, open it and see if it’s what you were searching for. And I’m not just talking about those seamless Photoshop jobs where you’ve superimposed a friend’s face on to a picture of Christina Aguilera during her Dirty Period (after her Micky Mouse Period and before her Candyman Period, she deemed it appropriate to wear arseless chaps about town and cornrow her platinum blonde hair so it looked like chains of that carpet fluff you pull out of the vacuum cleaner):

Or how you flawlessly worked your Harry Potter-loving friend’s name into a still from The Philosopher’s Stone for her birthday:

I’m talking about text documents and PDFs of academic journal chapters relied upon for assignments. I remember actually having to memorise which paper was which form how many Ds were in the file name. Speeches, assessment pieces, video files – they’re all named in a way with a total disregard for the future. I didn’t think about what would lay ahead, I was only concerned with the here and now. What a fool I was. I can’t find anything from before 2013 that isn’t named “dgfdsgfdgdfsg” or “RTHRTHW” and it’s all my fault. How wretched I must have been as a youth person.

I can only hope that young people can learn from the mistakes of my past. It’s painful admitting to who I used to be, but it’s time someone speaks up. We’ve got to break the cycle of reckless file naming. If sharing my story can stop just one teenager from ending up in my position, I’ll know my frustration won’t be in vain.

I never thought I’d say this, but Delta Goodrem was the best part of something.

I saw Cats over the weekend and to say I was unimpressed is putting it lightly.

I’m sorry Delta – you’ve been through some stuff, you’ve beaten cancer and somehow managed to build a viable career in the Australian entertainment industry, which I imagine is hard to do when it’s built almost entirely on pitifully fawning over anything that is popular in America. Your rendition of Memories was powerful and sounded bloody nice. Your hair is pretty good and you know what? I quite enjoyed Hating Allison Ashley. But I’m just not your biggest fan.

So for me to say that Delta was the only good thing about the show, that’s saying something. Sitting through that tripe was like enduring a lengthy workplace health and safety meeting where you’ve been promised a mystery treat at the end – you debate whether it’s worth sticking it out for the potential payoff (maybe it’s a custard danish, maybe it’s an emotional experience achieved through the climax of song and clever set decisions) or whether you should soil yourself as an excuse to leave abruptly.

Now don’t get me wrong, I bloody love musicals. Wicked changed my life, Guys and Dolls was a treat despite being a high school production and Julie Andrews is my homegirl. At 16-years-old my friends and I traipsed to an empty house heavy with shame after a big night of drinking Passion Pop and fraternising up with questionable boys and the only thing that would lift our hungover spirits was Maria and her curtain-clad posse of singers. Musicals are fantastic. But even productions that don’t go five minutes without someone breaking into song need to have a storyline. And that was something Cats was lacking in a big way.

The show wasn’t a coherent sequence of events that had any real substance, it was basically the musical theatre version of Eat, Sleep, Rave Repeat except with more fur and less angry kebab shop owners but probably the same amount of cocaine-fuelled rambling. It wasn’t a story; it was a list. Now, I as well as any internet user, will tell you of the merits of a listicle – which is essentially an article written in list-form (e.g. Top Ten Burger Joints in Brisbane if you’re from The Urban List with actual words or Things You Like About Nutella, with key points conveyed in gif-form if you’re from Buzzfeed). Listicles, usually, have structure, are easy to digest and always serve a purpose. But a musi-list is not valid format for entertainment unless your idea of entertainment is digging your nails into your skull in an attempt to try to keep awake.

I expected a backstory that maybe explained why cats had fallen from their godlike ancient Egyptian status to trashcan dwellers, or maybe a tale about the species’ plot to imprison the world while displaying their dominance over all earthlings. I thought there would be complex relationships and power struggles between the cats, like a feline Game of Thrones. I mean, it was one of the longest-running Broadway shows and had fans the world over – I at least hoped to see some weird sexy cat scenes which both turned me on and made me shut down socially while I internalised questions about whether I was some kind of sick bestiality-loving freak. I expected to feel disappointed and ashamed of myself in this regard, but instead I was left shaking my head at humanity. Why the hell do so many people like this garbage?!

A major reason I wanted to see the show – besides raunchy fetishism, that is – was because there were so many Cats jokes in a real masterpiece of modern entertainment – The Nanny. Everyone is constantly hanging shit on Mr Sheffield because he passed on producing the show, while his archrival Andrew Lloyd Weber took it on and became a god of Broadway. I wanted to understand the constant jibes and laugh along with the studio audience at every reference to the show and its infamous producer. But after seeing this spandex-clad dribble I have to say that I’ve changed my tune. I never thought I’d take sides with the man, but I have to say that Maxwell was right. The show never should have been a hit because it was rubbish and Andrew Lloyd Webber is an idiot. I feel so strongly about this I’m almost tempted to make shirts that say “Team Maxwell” and “Fuck Andrew Lloyd”.

There were a few positives to the performance, namely that I didn’t have to pay for this boil on the arse of musical theatre – my sister had gifted the experience to me as a birthday treat. An added bonus was that my sister was of the exact opinion as me, which meant we were able to exchange unimpressed looks between indulgent, unnecessary and completely disjointed solo performances. “I’d never let my children see this,” she told me. At the half time point I whipped out my phone and desperately searched the corners of the Internet for an explanation of what I had just witnessed. I thought that maybe I was mishearing the lyrics, or maybe this was a shortened version of the show with more singing and less speaking, or maybe I had accidentally inhaled crystal meth without realising it and was experiencing a hallucination from the costume cupboard of hell. Unfortunately the description we found online did not enlighten us further. We considered making a run for it before the lights dimmed once more, but we had come this far and we resolved to grimace, bear it and let it finish. Yes, Cats was like that frighteningly energetic boy who uses a vaginal canal like a sock and my sister and I were that poor girl laying there confused, infuriated but determined to at least get something out of this experience.  The choice was wrong for both situations.

Both of us groaned as the “show” started up again, both regretting the fact I had neglected to bring my earphones into the theatre with me. Had we been able share an earbud, we would have downloaded and watched Centre Stage – the greatest dance movie ever to be made – right there in our seats. Unfortunately I had not anticipated the need for devices to distract us from the chopped liver bloodying up the stage. I finally understood why the little boy sitting a few seats over have smuggled a book into the theatre – how I envied that crafty little prick.

Eventually the lights came on again and we were free to put as much space between us and that production as possible. Now, I haven’t the eloquence nor the knowledge of enough curse words to sum up my feelings on the disaster of a production, so I’ll conclude my thoughts in a similar fashion to how Cats was structured – a meaningless list of unrelated points. My sister spent the rest of the afternoon making a list of the things we’d rather do than endure the performance again. Here are some of the highlights from that list to finish this session:

Things I’d Rather Do Before Watching Cats Again*

– Sit in a hot car for the same amount of time as the show lasted

– Talk about music with a grown up scene kid who now posts pictures of every Triple J sponsored gig they go to with one of the band’s more obscure lyrics in the caption to show everyone how much they love music

– Forget my headphones at the gym

– Eat a bruised banana and I’m not talking just one pissy little blemish, I’m talking a lost in the bottom of a school bag, squashed by a dictionary banana  – Scrub oil off rocks after a severe spill off the coastline

– Vacuum old people

– Be laughed at for attempting to serve gazpacho at a barbecue

– Get 10 paper cuts

– Bang my hip into a desk, twice

– Write nice things about Anthony Mundine

– Watch back-to-back-to-back episodes of The Big Bang Theory

– Untangle a small child’s pony tail after she used Clag glue as styling mousse

– Rub foundation into Donald Trump’s neck skin

– Spend three hours trying to find the end of the sticky tape

– Have chilblains for a whole working week

– Always accidentally say “love you” before hanging up a work call out of habit of ending conversations with my family that way

– Vomit into the lap of a local dignitary

– Trim my father’s eyebrows

* Please note, this not an exhaustive list.

I have a Tinder account now, and it’s quite unsettling.

I was At Da Clubz as few weeks ago and one of my friends was doing a lot of swiping on her phone, regaling in online banter with well-groomed strangers and it looked like such fun. So my drunken self, which sometimes takes the form of an excitable toddler, decided to get on board. I believe I said something along the lines of “I want to play” like a small child wanting a turn at a cup and ball game.

Obviously I didn’t download it myself, because that would be embarrassing. Instead, I forced my friends to do it for me so I could truthfully run with the “oh, yeah this is just something my mates signed me up for, I’m not actually one of those people who us Tinder” line. They created my account, installed the app and even chose the photos for my profile, thus eliminating several soul searching minutes trying to determine whether the picture of me dressed as a “sexy pineapple” made me look like a whorebag or a comical party animal who just happened to have toned legs. With my social superiority established and three non-suggestive photos of myself selected, I was ready to take on the world of stylised finger navigation and witty exchanges.

But, like “stopping the boats”, “getting on Tinder” actually had horrifyingly ruthless methods, a gross dehumanization of innocent people and was drenched in hypercriticism. I was as heartless and discriminative as our country’s asylum seeker policy on that app; I was suspicious of everyone and not a soul made it shore. But it’s not my fault.

You see, I’m easily unimpressed.

My disapproval is so easily earned it’s like a Student of the Week certificate in a school with only 30 kids – all you have to do to be worthy of it is exist (although my awards are handed out for even more specific categories such as “most idiotic thing to brag about which should actually be cause for embarrassment” or “worst choice of body spray” and the ceremonies are held hourly rather than weekly). My judgemental distain is so liberally applied it may as well be a bottle of sunscreen at a Weasley beach party (obviously this needs to be made into a reality – imagine the board shorts Mr Weasley would get about in).

What’s worse is that it’s incredibly unjustified, as I am no prize pig myself. I can’t crush walnuts between my sculpted thighs or name all our past prime ministers, and I don’t think Lena Denham is the voice of my generation. Clearly, I’m not a great example of a human being. This opinion is further evidenced by a text message exchange between a friend and me this week:

Me: Want to hear something gross?

Respectable Person: Yas!

Me: My thrice-used gym socks smell like corn chips.

Respectable Person: Noooooo. Why haven’t you washed them?

Me: I’m busy.

Clearly, I’m not really qualified to be one handing down verdicts about other people’s scummy ways when my active wear reeks of cheese-flavoured snack food yet I still deem it suitable for public use. It doesn’t stop me, however, for creating a complex and deeply hierarchical taxonomy of people based on they way they carry their sunglasses.

But the thing is that I don’t do it on purpose – I really don’t. Some people are natural athletes: they can catch a ball flying at their face from any direction on instinct. You can’t explain their abilities other than natural, God-given talent. They can’t help but be good at sports. That’s like me, except instead of being able to throw a cricket ball over a Bunnings Warehouse complex; I can shoot a judgemental glance across seven football fields with the speed of a racing car. If I see someone driving a Commodore with white sunglasses I immediately classify them as a douchebag with lightning-fast speed. It’s just my natural reflexes kicking in. I can’t help it.

Some people would see this as a positive thing. For one thing, it helps us identify threats (whether that be to our street credibility or a our lives by helping us detect a member of an enemy tribe with a flint to ready to be lodged into our brains). It’s our ability to make snap judgments that has helped human beings survive the wilderness and dominate other species to allow us to be the creatures who get to enjoy air conditioning and novelty pyjamas while the others have to live in literal doghouses.

But other people say this talent for immediate classification of people into minute subgroups based on their outfit choices/use of slang/personalised plates/any other aspect of their lives impacted by their free will is actually a bad thing. These are probably also the people who find their live partners online.

Because while someone might have chose a photograph of what looks like a hand-dug grave as a lure to attract future partners (not a joke, I have the screenshot for evidence), that person might just be an excellent cook who makes hilarious observations about the world and doesn’t mind being the designated driver. The person who is proudly displaying a cruiser as evidence they like to party may be an excellent listener who knows all the words to Float On AND Khe San. And that guy who chose three cringe-worthy formal pictures may have gentle hands but a powerful thrust and excellent breakfast recipes. Unfortunately, all you see is a photo. And if one of those photos looks like the pit your mangled body will be dumped in once that maniac tracks you down and cuts you into 11 to 17 pieces, then you’re probably going to swipe left. You’d be a slightly-homicidal dinglebat if you didn’t.

So where does that leave me? Right where I started, I suppose: using social media to judge people for using social media to judge other people on social media, while desperately clinging to a deluded sense of supremacy rooted in the belief that I’m not like any of them. And who wouldn’t want to swipe right on that?

It seems there are very few things I won’t do to for attention.

As the third of four children, my entire life has been a screaming fit directed at fixing the gaze of my parents, extended family members, teachers and even total strangers squarely on me. After more than two decades of such behaviour, I have become acutely aware of my ways. Although the events of the previous weekend have revealed that my “look at me-ing” has become so deeply ingrained in my behaviour patterns, it is now subconscious.

Now, Rational Dannielle would never fall from a horse on purpose, but I can’t help that Subconscious Dannielle far more devious and ruthless. She’s also a cunning little minx who thinks about the long term, because the initial fall was only Stage One of show pony plan. Stage Two had plenty more to give the next day.

There was a delay of some hours before I hit the emergency room. It wasn’t until the next afternoon when I realised the only way my hand wasn’t in pain made it look like I was groping myself in public when it occurred to me that this was not normal and definitely was not suitable for work. So I had my roommate drop me off at the emergency room.

“I’m sorry to say it, but you’ve broken your wist,” the doctor told me. But she had no cause to apologise. This was extraordinary news.

I’ve never had a broken bone before. I used to watch enviously as my primary school friends were showered with attention when they would appear on a Monday morning with a broken bone from their adventurous weekend pursuits. Playing sport or doing literally anything on The Farm boasted huge rewards for my friends: immediate sympathy, special treatment and a living graffiti wall. They would come to school plastered up and I would stew in my tidy tray. But apparently my desire for attention of any kind was over ridden by my lack of interest in doing things, because I continued honing my favourite crafts every weekend: revealing in my solitude and pretending I was gifted because I was of a slightly higher than adequate intelligence for my grade (first one out of a class of less than 20 kids to be able to read? Obviously I am the second coming of Stephen Hawking). So when the doctor asked if I wanted a sling, I didn’t hesitate.

A sling was like a giant neon light telling the world I was injured and deserved concerned glances and looks of jealousy-tainted admiration from those who asked how I earned my sleeve of honour. Like a child who would throw sand in the eyes of an innocent fellow pre-schooler so the teacher would glance sideways admire her sand castle (me) or a the college student who jumped at the chance to be the only girl to do a keg stand a “frat party” (also me), I was happy to wear the equivalent to a giant red flashing arrow pointing out my minimal fracture.

And let’s be honest here, I didn’t do much to make my condition much better. It didn’t put ice on my wrist because it was too damn cold in my house already. I did put a compression bandage on it, but that was merely because I was hosting a house party, and I wasn’t about to let my cool injury go unnoticed. That bandage was about as medically beneficial as adding chlorophyll extract to water and just as much about showing off. When the doctor asked if I had been taking pain medication, I had to fudge the truth a bit. “I was going to take ibuprofen,” I told her, “but I didn’t have any at home so I just went to sleep.” I didn’t want to tell her my pain mediation was a mixture of cider, vodka and medicinal tequila. As cool as this doctor was, I doubted whether she’d approve of my treatment plan.

Hmm. I think I need professional help… just think of how sorry people will feel for me!

I have now added an entire species to my list of enemies.

Yep, right up there with the sick puppy who created the Dental Elegance television advert and coriander is one of the most heinous and ruthlessly malicious species on the planet: rabbits.

You might be under the impression that they are sweet little mammals who only live to give Bambi life advice or dress lazy a Disney princesses, but that’s just what they want you to think.

Under their cute, fluffy-tailed surface beats the heart of a monster. These hopping balls of hatred thrive on destruction. For one, they leave many a veggie patch in a state of utter desolation. They’re also on a warpath with one of our country’s most beloved marsupials: the bilby. Furiously jealous of the bilby’s success as a deliverer of festive eggs to children who don’t really need to be eating a kilo of chocolate, the rabbit has been on a rampage against these furry Top Blokes; overtaking their homes, stealing their food sources and, no doubt, taking their jobs. It’s disgusting.

Not content with unauthorised veggie snacking or pillaging Bilby settlements, the rabbit is launching attacks on kind-hearted, charming people. Namely, me.

It might be a while until we get to the point here, but bear with me and I will reveal the chilling events of the weekend which has led my to this spine-tingling conclusion.

A group of us from The Office decided to act like normal people and have plans for the weekend. We had a couple of visitors to the region amongst us, so we decided to show our friends the land we lived on and booked a horse trail ride. We saddled up and went on our way, with the horses plodding along without much need for encouragement, or even steering for that matter. Everything was going fine, albeit a little on the slow side. Being the unapologetic show pony that I am, this wasn’t enough for me.

Let’s be honest here, I do like to play up to my Queenslander reputation, and am happy to pretend I know things about agriculture (sorghum is used to make Milo!). In fact, I once let our federal minister for agriculture assume I was reared on a farm and didn’t correct him despite knowing full well that the only farming activity on our block was that time my dad tried to outsmart the system and grow his own damn steaks. And after all, I did have three riding lessons under my belt from a woman in a long-term relationship with a man called Clancy. I was practically the man from Snowy River. So I was totally up for a casual trot.

So there I was, leading the pack atop a horse called Akubra of all things feeling like one of McLeod’s illegitimate Daughters (or at least a removed relative who had miraculously popped up just in time to run the homestead after another death/birth/ agriculturally-based tragedy). I had found my groove and I was only slowing down so people could catch up and see how somewhat adequate I was at remaining seated on an incredibly tame and un-energetic animal.

Everything was going fine until the rabbit-folk decided to intervene.

I had just broken out into a trot when a fur-covered little demon popped up out of its evil underground lair and gave my noble steed a right royal fright. While my years watching The Saddle Club made me expect a spooked horse would rear up on two legs and somehow cause lightning to crash nearby, my fall from Akubra (I’m actually annoyed because there was a horse there named Grace and that would have made this whole episode much more palatable had I literally fallen from Grace) was somewhat less dramatic.

Akubra did a step to the right like he was Jonathan Thurston cheekily darting through a sky-blue defence line and I went left. But I wasn’t technically “thrown” off the horse; it was more like I’d greased up my thighs and the saddle was made out of non-stick cookware. I slid off that saddle like a fried egg out of a frypan.

I hit the ground, and while I’m told I didn’t hit my head, I do finally understand the science behind those cartoon characters who see stars after an anvil lands on their head. Except I was shocked to find that there were no Looney Tunes characters flying around in a circle above my head: all I experienced was having what seemed like a shitty yellow Instagram filter over my eyes, like I was planning on hashtagging my vision with #nostalgic and #iamsoartisticanddeepbecauseiselectedtouseabuiltinfeatureofthisphotapp. I was mildly concerned at this point, because there was also this sensation of having black static in my eye and I couldn’t really see properly. This was a problem because I quite like being able to perceive my surroundings; it’s one of my favourite hobbies along with respiration and having an adequate blood supply.

Thankfully this subsided after a few minutes and I was right back on the horse. Yes, holding the reins with what turned out to be a fractured radius was uncomfortable, but at least being back in the saddle made me feel like a tough country girl.

It also meant I was a good one-and-a-half metres above a fucking bunny rabbit; I’ll be damned if I was going to let another one of those hateful bastards get close enough to me to finish off the job.